The New Republic

WILLIAM “PUDGE” HEFFELFINGER was America’s first professional football player, paid $500 to man the line for the Allegheny Athletic Club in Pittsburgh’s Recreation Park. That game, played on November 12, 1892, was just a scrum in the mud, less sport than brawl. You took an elbow, spit some teeth, drove on. But who will be the last pro, the last man to stand in the locker-room line awaiting his greenies, Toradol, and shots of Novocain? READ MORE >>

Within fourteen days of each other, two rush-hour calamities: a bridge collapse and a steam-pipe explosion. In Minneapolis, a forty-year-old bridge along highway I-35W suddenly dropped sixty feet into the Mississippi River, killing at least five people and injuring approximately one hundred more. The federal government had deemed the bridge structurally deficient in 1990, which the Minnesota Department of Transportation acknowledged in separate reports issued in 2005, 2006, and 2007, after inspecting the bridge. READ MORE >>